We've linked DoDg3's PCDB entry before, but it's been updated recently with a lot of pictures showing how this case was put together. If you think it's a simple job of whacking components into the case and drilling a few holes for cables, think again:

With the nVidia's release of the nvSystemUtility, Drayzen sent in this link to an interview with Scott Baker, nVidia's senior product manager for its nForce business unit, about overclocking and how he expects the nvSystemUtility to change the universe of chip crankers.

This from Kasi. "I know that application benchmarks are supposed to more accurately reflect real world hard disk performance. However many people, even review sites, still like to use HD Tach as a way to compare performance. Anyway there is a new version, 2.70 released which will work on Windows XP and Windows 2000 for read testing without needing to be registered". You can find it here.

In the power supply arena, there is often very little separating one generic grey box from another. G3D found two PSUs that are not plain grey boxes and put them head to head. The Silverstone ST360 up against the Kingwin KWI-450WABK. Full article here. Meanwhile, HardwareZoom have put a pair of scanners against each other. The Canon CanoScan LiDE30 vs Epson Perfection 1260 scanner shootout.

Pelts for the People: WHAT'S BEYOND WATER COOLING?. Thats the title of a new article over at The Mod Fathers. If you are thinking of playing around with extreme cooling for your CPU/GPU, this article is for you. You could also have a browse through our own Extreme Cooling forum for Cathar's thread detailing his Experiments in peltier-based water-chilling. Cool!

SFFTech check out the range of SFF (small form factor) PCs at a recent Computex. Some small, not so small, quiet, noisy, some ugly, and everything in between.

In the less extreme area of watercooling, Viper Lair have revised their Wet and Chilly Chips Water Cooling System.

A Brisbane teenager has been arrested after allegedly hacking into an Australian ISP. For some reason, I don't feel sorry for him. Thanks neXus.

We've posted this before but it's still funny so we'll post it again. Its a 3.2Mb video of an Apple Mac parody. "Mac, killed my inner child!" Thanks Rob.

How about a full featured computer that fits in your pocket. Well you might have to save up a bit longer but they going to be available soon.

Blood! We all need it, but Eddie tells me that blood stocks in Sydney are down to about one days worth. I don't think things are much better in any of the other city's in Australia. If you can find the twenty minutes it takes, why not consider donating blood. All the info you need on how to go about this can be found on the Australian Red Cross website or by calling 13 14 95. Give it some thought. You won't miss a litre or so.

Who remembers the game "Prince Of Persia"? Oh...the hours I spent on that one. Well, thanks to LoneWolf, thats what you get for todays flash timewaster. Get it here.

First up this morning, Whirlpool are currently running a broadband survey - "Whirlpool's Australian Broadband Survey 2003 is the first comprehensive survey run by users, for users. It's designed to give the ordinary consumer a voice about how they feel about their broadband provider and the state of broadband in Australia generally.". That sounds like a noble cause to me. If you're interested in contributing, you can find the survey here. Thanks to those who sent in the link.

Opera Software have released a new version of their browser for all Nokia Series 60 phones. More information on Darkvision Hardware.

PC Review have written a guide to running your old DOS-based games/abandonware in Windows2000 or XP via DOS emulation. Hmmm, now where did I put that old Airborne Ranger disc!

3DVelocity have had a quick look at nVidia's System Utility application for nForce2/3 based motherboards, and it looks pretty interesting. I had a look at it a few minutes ago myself, and it looks useful. You can grab it from nVidia. Meanwhile, DarkVision Hardware detail the Intel alternative, the "Intel Desktop Control Center". Houston, we have a problem......

Futurelooks talks about online journaling. "Talking and writing are great ways of getting your feelings out and getting a handle on what you think about things. Sometimes you want to talk with people -- in person, on the phone, via Instant Message, or in a chat room. But sometimes, you want to talk at people -- a one-way download of your thoughts, feelings, and bright ideas. A perfect means of doing this is the online journal."

We may have mentioned this before, but I'm so damn impressed I'm going to mention it again anyway. A thousand lucky internet users in Ballarat, Victoria will have Passive Optical Network technology installed early next year, providing a 100Mbps internet connection to their home. I wonder if I could get a job in Ballarat.

It seems spammers are getting more and more sophisticated, as well as more and more annoying. The latest craze? Blogspamming.

Do you like Barbie? Do you like Linux? OK, you're most likely an unusual individual, but what if your worlds collided? Barbie Linux of course. I can't wait for GI Joe Linux!

There are a couple of nice entries in the PCDB that are worth a look - some groovy smokestacks on this beastie from Solanis, and a vodka cooled PC from Alfonzo. I'm not sure how long that would last at a party .... I wonder which mixer goes with PC?

Here's an interesting idea from Ibkikn. There's no description, but it seems that the radiator in this watercooled system has been replaced by a large reservoir on top of the case. This is cooled by a peltier with a large passive heatsink to get rid of the resulting heat. This removes the fan noise from having a radiator and would be one step closer to a totally silent PC.

Great news on the anti-spamming front, with a landmark judgement being handed down in California, source of much spam. The judgment, which Lockyer said will be the model for future spam injunctions, forbids PW Marketing from sending unsolicited commercial e-mail, accessing computers that belong to other people without their permission and disguising its identity by sending e-mails that appear to originate from a different address. The injunction also forbids Willis and Griffin for 10 years from owning or managing any business that advertises over the Internet.

Time to update your anti-virus software again. There's a new trojan/virus doing the rounds. At this stage it appears to be spread via mIRC. Infected users will post a link in an IRC channel to a file called britney.jpg. Clicking on this link will then either infect your machine, crash your browser or both. Only Internet Explorer users seems to infected at this stage but you never know. I'm unsure if this is a new virus or a variant of an old one, but either way, its likely to be bad news. If you don't run any anti-virus software (OMG!) then you're asking for trouble. I can recommend AVG Anti-Virus which is free for personal use, or at the very least you could use one of the online scanners such as Mcafee Freescan or Trendmicro's Housecall. These days there are new virus/trojan threats popping up on a daily basis so protecting yourself is no longer optional. Get protected now!

Hitwise is pleased to announce that www.overclockers.com.au ranked No. 1 in the most recent quarter among Australian websites. This ranking is based on visits among the Computers and Internet - Hardware category.

This first award isn't too surprising, as we've been contesting first place in that category for literally years. However, the big surprise was this one:

Hitwise is pleased to announce that www.overclockers.com.au ranked No. 1 in the most recent quarter among Australian websites. This ranking is based on visits among the News and Media - IT Media category.

This is big news for us and quite surprising, as it presumably places us above sites with much larger corporate backing and vast budgets compared to our own. We don't have access to the full rankings to see who else is listed in the categories, but we can assume the usual suspects are there.

So, thanks to everyone for helping cement our position as the #1 PC hardware website in Australia! Particularly our Major Sponsors: Computer Alliance, Plus Corporation and Altech Computers. PC Range have also been strongly involved with the site for the last few months. Of course, big credit has to go to my fellow newsmonkeys Mred32 and Gibbon, the team of forum Admins who keep things running smoothly and the vast community that makes OCAU what it is. Thanks guys!

Just a reminder about the OCAU Merchandise that's been available for a couple of weeks now. We've had well over 100 orders already, so this stuff isn't going to be available forever! There's been a lot of good feedback about the new mugs, stubby holders and polo shirts. Remember you get free shipping, too!

It's the end of the line for the Alpha 64-bit processor, which has been passed from DEC to Compaq to HP over the last 11 years, thanks Sniper. It (and the team that created it) are often credited as the basis of some technology in AMD's Athlon CPU line.

If your PC, mobile phone or other gadgets are acting weirdly today, it could be due to a Coronal Mass Ejection that the Sun is currently aiming our way. The solar stream erupted from a cluster of sunspots on the surface of the sun. The giant dark patch, known as sunspot group 10484, has grown to the size of Jupiter in recent days and has migrated across the face of the sun to a position where it now faces Earth.

There have been similar, but smaller, events like this recently. However, this is apparently the biggest one since 1859. Depending on who you believe, this will either have no effect or break/confuse lots of things including electricity supply. So, I guess we'll see as the day unfolds.

Soc has organised a Canberra Motor Cruise for riders and drivers. Full details in the thread, but you start at Parkes Place and mosey on down to Batemans Bay for some fish and chips. Mmm.. sounds pretty good!

nVidia have announced the release of two new graphics cards, namely, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is aimed at the mid-range line and is based upon the NV36 chip. Aimed at the high-end comes the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra which is built around the NV38. A new set of drivers have also been released, known as the ForceWare Release 50 Graphics Driver. This is said to improve the performance issues seen with nVidia cards and DX9 compatibility. These new cards, and the drivers, have been released just in time to get them on the shelves ready for the holiday shopping spree, but do they deliver anything new? The reviews are flowing in so you can read up and find out for yourself.

Tigger notes that Microsoft have a guide showing us how to tell if an email is from them and not some nasty virus. Is there a difference? Only kidding :)

A little while ago, ModSynergy posted their concerns about the after effects of using Nanotherm PCM+ thermal paste. Today they post the final update to the story.

Lots of people sent this one in. It seems that the creators of the game Grand Theft Autoare being sued for millions over a murder! Are they to blame?

News-hound Tekka has been busy. NASA breaks Linux records using a 256-processor Silicon Graphics Altix system. The frame rate in Doom 3 will be capped at 60 FPS. Intel chip aims to detect disease. And PC's can turn you into a raving maniac! Thanks Tekka.

Talk about a Big Mac! How about a low-cost supercomputer built from 1100 Mac's. Thanks Dink.

Also from Dink, It's official. Gator is not Spyware! It's only Adware. Spyware or Adware, either way it's nasty if you want my personal opinion.

A couple of LANS coming up. Insomnia is a LAN in the Newcastle area and is running 22 - 23 Nov 2003. Also, Central Queensland Gamers League (CQGL) is on in Rockhampton, QLD on the 1st and 2nd of November. Details here.

Looking for an excuse to get out on your bike this weekend? In all capital cities, the Pink Ribbon Ride is on this coming Sunday. The purpose of the event is to raise funds for The Cancer Council NSW help in the fight against breast cancer. It's $10 to register and a great day out. See you out there!

Want to run more than one operating system on your PC? FlickerDown will tell you how.

Interesting thing on NewScientist about making electricity using water and tiny channels. If the output can be increased, says Larry Kostiuk of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, then high pressure water could one day be used to power small devices such as mobile phones and calculators.

Dan has more letters, believe it or not. Stay tuned for an OCAU expose about this "Dan" person actually being an army of letter-answering and review-writing robots.

Two time-wasters for you today. First is Ultimate Soccer Showdown, a downloadable game spotted by CD Man. The second - and I must warn that this one is extremely addictive - is a Flash game called Globulos.

From the PCDB: Two slightly different takes on the suitcase PC idea from Wudan and Zippy992001, both quite well done. There's a custom clear mini-PC from ClearBox, and you don't see a modded VapoChill too often. Nicely finished minitower from lazychef, while BigKriss's fulltower with fans reminds me of the days when everyone had big loud fulltowers. :) Still got my HX-08 around here somewhere..

Dan has replied to yet more letters, column number 67 no less. "Another installment. This time, letters about CD durability, gold harvesting, camera image formats, CPU cooling, too-fast PC clocks, RSS, free speakers, car PCs, wireless power transmission, 1.5 volt rechargeables, and electric blinds. And a reply from someone I'm trying to annoy." Dan's letters column is great, one of my first stops on the net.

It seems a couple of companies have claimed a new internet speed record, set last week when 1.1 Terabytes of data was transferred at a rate of 5.44 Gbps. Thanks to those newshounds who sent in the link.

^catalyst sent in a link to a Netiquette RFC. Lots of good tips in there to help make your online flameproof suit redundant. A good read!

The Register reports a complaint to Israel's antitrust department over a lack of Hebrew language support in Microsoft Office and IE for Macs.

Designtechnica ponder the role of technology in our lives, and ask the question "Are we becoming technology dependant?". I can really relate to that - whenever we lose power or a server at work I seem to slip into a trance-like state, totally unable to do anything ....

Lots of people emailed in to tell us that a new version of Mozilla (v1.5), Firebird (v0.7) and Thunderbird (v0.3) have been released. You can get them from Mozilla. UPDATE : More information in our forums here. Thanks Force.

Tonight's timewasters are from homestarrunner. Not sure if we've linked them before, but they're still fun :) Thanks Benjamin.

Finally, Arachnadactly sent a warning about another potential eBay scam, in the form of an email asking for credit card details. Remember to be careful whenever any site asks for that kind of information via email, and if in doubt, don't do it. Some of the scams we've seen recently targeting online banking users, eBay users and others have been very convincing.

Good luck to the five Aussies contesting their respective classes in the Motorcycle Grand Prix at Philip Island tomorrow. Troy Bayliss, Garry McCoy and Andrew Pitt in the MotoGP class, Anthony West in the 250's and Casey Stoner in the 125's. Make us proud! Plenty of coverage on Ch10 if you want to see it tomorrow.

Ever wanted to turn your computer on using a key card? Kind of like punching in at work. It's not as hard as you might think, and GideonTech want to show you how. We also have a guide to building a key start for your PC by Baker.

There have been several Matrix parody's out and about since the release of the original movie. This one has to be one of the best. Several sized videos are available from 10mb to 65mg in both MOV and WMV formats. I laughed. Thanks to thetron for the link.

What would todays kids have to say if they were to play a game of Pong!, or Super Mario Brothers, or sit in front of an Atari for a while. Read this and find out. Yep, I feel old now.

Identity theft! A quick way to ruin a persons life in many ways. It looks like South Australia is going to introduce a law that will outlaw just that kind of thing. The first in this country.

Telstra's problems are not getting any better it seems, with a virus/trojan now being blamed. They have an official statement here, and you can find more info on Whirlpool and ZDNet. Thanks predder.

There has been a heap of new security patches released by Microsoft in the last day or two. I wont go into all the details but suffice to say, we need them. Get them here. Grab all the ones for October, and any others you have missed in the past. Thanks to all those who sent in the link.

While we're on the topic of Microsoft, Bill Gates says that "developing its next generation of Windows operating system software (Longhorn) will cost as much as it cost the United States government to put a man on the Moon." It says so right here. Thanks Duncan.

YYK sends word of a worthy event coming up, one for those into pedal power. Its the "Sydney to the Gong bike ride for the MS Society (Multiple Sclerosis), on Sunday 2 November." As well as riders, YYK is looking for 500 Volunteers to help out on the day. If you can lend a hand, or some feet even, drop into the forum thread linked, and get in touch.

Wheels clamps for parking offenders. We don't have them here in Australia that I know of, but if they ever arrive here, I want this guy to move in. Angle Grinder Man. You've gotta give him points for the costume at least :) Thanks Arachnadactly.

Just a reminder about the OCAU Merchandise that's been available for a week now. We've had over 100 orders already, so this stuff isn't going to be available forever! There's been a lot of good feedback about the new mugs, stubby holders and polo shirts. Remember you get free shipping, too!

China joins the former Soviet Union and the USA in sending a human into space. This is some pretty big news, there's a thread discussing it in our Media & Current Events forum here. Most people (elsewhere too) seem to be focussing more on the politics than the technology. Oh well. :)

One of the things I complained about in my VapoChill review was that the ChillControl utility was only accessible via a DOS floppy disk. HotHardware have a sneak preview of a Windows version that I will be very interested in taking a look at when it's available.

There's a mIRC exploit which can let someone crash your browser. Info here, download a patched version here. Thanks to everyone who sent those in. The really funny thing was watching all the scriptkiddies coming into #overclockers and trying unsuccessfully to use this exploit.

We've seen this guessing game before but it's a pretty clever time-waster so worth another go, thanks OMAGAN.

Bjorn3D set up a RAID0 array using two 200GB Maxtor drives. For a similar thing but using 2 and 4 WD Raptor drives, see here.

IBM has a new mainframe CPU in the works, while Transmeta have debuted their Efficeon processor. This new CPU has an interesting approach to solving transistor leakage.. hmm, that last one almost sounds like an April fools gag, not heard of that issue before.

AusGamers have info on a new Xbox Bundle, if you're thinking of picking one up for Christmas, thanks Herby.

That must be an NDA I hear lifting.. we're received a pile of Radeon 9600 XT video chipset reviews. How does this differ from the existing Radeon 9600 Pro? Higher clockspeeds of course, and - with future drivers - an automatic overclocking function called OverDrive.

TweakTown check out the unofficial 802.11G wireless standard to see if it's all it is cracked up to be.

From Dink, Microsoft announces some new security initiatives. Dink also notes something that the rest of us have known for years, and that is that managers don't know how to use computers.

Transmeta have officially unveiled their Efficeon Processor. Although we've been hearing about these for a while, this is the first official word on the clock speeds these cool-running chips will work at. Thanks Stmok. While we're on the subject of new chips, VIA have introduced their tiny "NanoBGA" X86 CPU. This chip runs at seven watts at 1GHz!!! Read more here. Thanks WolfMoon.

It's a shootout, messenger style. EliteGuild have put the two more popular IM programs up against each other, namely Trillian and Miranda, to see how they stack up.

Dink (and several others) send word that Telstra is doing deals with the recording companies and will soon offer paid music downloads. "Telstra says BigPond Music will become Australia's largest music download site. Single tracks and albums will be available for download in early December, and will not count towards broadband download caps". This could be a good thing, depending on the final pricing because it looks like Kazaa will start charging for music downloads as well. Maybe the recording companies have finally woken up! The last link came from Steven.

Dan has reviewed a nifty little err...thing! Its the "Swiss Army Micro-Light Pocket Tool Chest". Have a look. One of these would make a nice X-Mas gift, for me. You can check out his latest batch of letters while you're there.

Finally, a few pieces from Tekka: Maxtor claim that they can double the storage capacity of a hard drive using current technology. Microsoft have put back the release of Windows Longhorn until 2006. Also, this page has some interesting stats about Australian's internet usage.

Well, what a weekend! Bathurst, F1, Moto GP, Cricket and Rugby. I think my couch has a new butt groove.

On with the news .... Spode's Abode have a guide to making a cheap fanbus. They claim it can be made for one pound sterling, which is close to the average weekly wage in Aussie Dollars, but still not bad!

Madshrimps show you how to mount a Prometia or VapoChill on your brand new Athlon 64/FX51 setup. "In due time CPU kits will be offered from both nVentiv and Asetek for the AMD A64/FX51 motherboards. But for those of us that don't want to wait, we must improvise!". I'm not entirely sure the words improvise, Prometia and Athlon 64/FX51 sit very comfortably with me, given the not insignificant portion of my nett worth they would cost me .... maybe I'm just getting old. Do it at your own risk, blah blah blah.

Arstechnica have published a new edition of their Linux column, Linux.Ars.

Ever felt like modding a pumpkin? Well, this is your lucky day, as Bjorn3d are running a competition for the best pumpkin mod in celebration of Halloween. There are some nice nVidia cards on offer as prizes, and I can't immediately see anything stopping international entries. Photos of the modded pumpkin seem to be all that's required for entry.

Some parents in the US are suing a school for installing a Wi-Fi network, asserting "serious health risks". Thanks dcarney.

Dan has replied to some more letters in Letters Column 65 ... the last one is a classic. Give yourself an uppercut, son!

Sniper sent news that the Intel CPU roadmap has changed, with Tejas postponed to 2005. That article also mentions that Prescott is likely to dissipate 120W, which is sure to be a cooling challenge. Thanks Sniper.

A shopping centre in Germany is now offering a "man creche" service. "German women fed up with their partners' grumbling on weekend shopping trips can now dump them at a special kindergarten for men offering beer and entertainment.". Sounds great! Of course I'll have to find a partner and move to Germany. Thanks reax.

The timewaster for tonight comes Muppatz in the form of Icy Tower 1.2.

In case you aren't aware, this is a bumper weekend for motorsport fans even if you only have free-to-air TV. Sure, there's cricket and football of some kind on the other channels, but on Saturday and Sunday there's the Bathurst round of the V8 Supercars, hours of coverage. Later on Sunday there's Formula 1 and about midnight Sunday there's MotoGP. Hand me the doritos and beer and make room on the couch! Update: SpeedRacer says that Telstra Bigpond customers get some cool V8 Supercar content online.

Don't worry about your mobile phone giving you cancer.. now it might just explode, thanks Andypoo.

Arctic Silver 5 is apparently going to available later this month, following on from the popular Arctic Silver 3 thermal paste. Overklokking.no has a preview and explains why there's no version 4, thanks PapaSurf.

Finally! People have been hassling me for months to get some OCAU Polo Shirts made up, and thanks to Bren we now have some available. We also have some really awesome big coffee mugs and stubby holders as well as the tshirts, case badges and stickers from before.

Big news for the day is the release of version 3.8 of the ATI Catalyst drivers with a number of new interesting features. Beyond3D have taken a look at them in detail and you can get them from here. Thanks to all those who sent in the links.

The folks at Hexus have got their hands on a Pentium 4 EE CPU, coupled it with a volt modded EPoX 4PDA2+, and thrown them into a Vapochill XE. How did it go??? Have a look and see.

You service your car regularly, just as you service your computer every now and then. PCStats have a beginners guide to your Annual PC Checkup.

The Gaming Industry: Past, Present and Future. Thats the title of an eight part article on Flickertown.

Tom has posted an interesting, if not slightly long (25 pages), article on the process involved in manufacturing Chenbro cases.

Juggling with packets: floating data storage. An interesting read on the possibilities of using certain properties of the Internet or any other large network to create a reliable, volatile distributed data storage of a large capacity. Read it here. Thanks richiev.

Here is one not-so good way to advertise your anti-spam software. From Duncan.

From RobsGT4: Here's some news for the whole Distributed Computing scene, the new Seti client is on its way and it will let users choose to do more than one project. This means you can run both Seti and F@H on the same machine and set each projects CPU usage. Here's the link and also a forum thread.

News from HyRax1, "Just a quick note to advise that the Sydney leg of the Amiga OS4.0 Roadshow showcasing the fourth official release of the Amiga OS and the next-generation AmigaOne PPC hardware platform is on this coming weekend at the Guthrie Theatre at UTS. Entry will be $2 to cover administrative costs." More info can be found here and in the forums here.

With all the speculation running riot around the internet at the moment, WorldOverclockers try to cut through the noise with an article called "The Valve Half-Life 2 Incident". SnRuB sent in this link with some more info about the stolen code.

Recently AMD introduced its new Duron, the Applebred, with its FSB limited to 266Mhz and the L2 cache at 64Kb. You can see how they stack up against the Athlon XP over at MadShrimps.

PCstats have compiled a comprehensive array of the many Athlon64 motherboards from over a dozen different manufacturers that were on show at Computex 2003, and should be available in the near future, 44 Athlon 64 motherboards!

Does having to unplug your speakers every time you want to use your headphones annoy you? Herby sent in a quick mod article which shows you how to set up a separate headphone socket. When you plug your headphones in, it disconnects the audio signal to your speakers automatically.

Short notice, but Lyle from ABIT let me know that they're having an event at a new internet cafe called iStar Zone in Sydney. We're doing it in conjunction with Atomic magazine and THQ for the release of their new game, Warhammer. We're inviting about 60 end-users, plus resellers, distys and our favourite Aussie media!

There's a 5kb html file here and a 1.5MB Word doc here with info about the event. It's this Thursday at 6pm in the CBD. I haven't decided if I'm going to be able to make it or not, but if you go, be sure to mention OCAU. :)

Lyle also made it pretty clear that ABIT are going to be focusing more closely on the Australian market over the next few months. We've reviewed a few of their products recently and been impressed - hopefully we'll continue to see good things from them.

Congrats to Queenslander Chris Vermeulen who is now the World Supersport Champion.. thanks to Aaron for reminding me.

Beyond3D checked out the ATI Radeon 9100 IGP, which is one of ATI's attempts at a P4 motherboard chipset. Meanwhile, Hexus reviewed the Athlon 64 3200+ on VIA K8T800 and nForce3 150 in retail form. Will one of these combinations be in your next PC?

IBM have been thinking about how to make laptop hard drives less likely to die when the laptop is dropped, and they've come up with this. The new ThinkPad R50 and T41 laptops boast what IBM's calling Active Protection System, technology that responds to sudden acceleration by parking the hard drive read/write head until the PC is stabilized. Yes, but it doesn't stop your screen from getting that big black spiderweb effect.

Tesla coils are pretty cool - here's a an Australian guy taking his hobby very seriously, thanks Laurens.

Hope you're enjoying your long weekend, if you're in a state that has today off. I went to Oktoberfest on the weekend.. suffice to say I'm in something of a state myself. Urrggh..

ICANN has demanded VeriSign remove their SiteFinder service.. and they have.

Swift2k was the first to send in this dual-layer DVD+R. Developed by Philips Research in cooperation with MKM (Mitsubishi Kagaku Media)/Verbatim, the technology virtually doubles data storage capacity on DVD recordable discs from 4.7 Gbyte to 8.5 Gbyte while remaining compatible with existing DVD Video players and DVD-ROM drives.

SiS have released their SiS655FX chipset for the P4, with dual DDR400 support, AGP8X, 800MHz FSB and some other cutting-edge features. HotHardware have a review and so do MyWorldHardware.

Don't like Telstra's ADSL infrastructure? Build your own, as this South Australian ISP did, thanks Dink.

TweakFactor are a new site with a new cooler lapping guide. While you're in a hands-on mood, Pimprig show you how to make a blowhole in your case.

If you thought parking is expensive when you spend a few hours in the city, imagine forgetting about your car for 25 years in a parking station, thanks Reaver.

Ever wish you could use a clunky old typewriter as your PC keyboard? No? Well, me neither. But someone's wife did, so he made it so, thanks Callan.

A zillion people sent in news that the Half-Life 2 source code has been stolen! More info on shacknews, VE3D, slashdot and SMH.com.au. Most critical is this explanation about the hacking/leak and possibly-related DOS attacks from a Valve spokesperson.

Matt spotted this future CPU from Intel that apparently will allow future machines to run, say, Windows XP together with Linux or the Apple operating system as easily as today's Windows computers run Word and Internet Explorer simultaneously.

One of the better graphics card tweak tools around has been updated. RivaTuner 2.0 RC 14 is awaiting your download. This seems to be the biggest version upgrade so far in RivaTuner's history. You can grab it from here or here.

OCPrices have an article on how to quieten down your PC. They give a run down of where the noise comes from and what you can do about it.

Over on Vr-Zone you can read about an Athlon FX-51 (2.2Ghz) overclocked to over 3Ghz using an ASUS SK8N with the new 1003.003 BIOS that allow multiplier adjustments. The dry-ice helps I think. Nice!

Dink sent this in and I'm not sure if I should laugh at this item or not. Having your virtual goods stolen from your virtual house in the virtual world of an online computer game! Yet according to this article sent in by Fatso, some computer games are being used to train the criminal catchers.

Ever wondered where the CTRL-ALT-DELETE key combination came from, or why we have it? This guy knows, because he invented it.Thanks to Skit from sc0re.com for the link.

Lindows is getting up the nose of Microsoft again, this time by offering to process claims for Californians entitled to proceeds from a $US1.1 billion class-action settlement with the software giant. Thanks to Kerridwyn for that one.

wild reminds us that the IRC quotes database at smokeyou.org has moved to quotes.ugbox.net. Thanks wild, and thanks to the ugbox team for hosting it.

From Amateur: "One of my more self-motivated mates built his own FX Light, and did it pretty well. He also put together very detailed instructions which I think some people will find very handy." Its very pretty! You can find the details here.

It seems that camera-phones are everywhere now, even in places they shouldn't be! From yyk.

There are a couple of LANS coming up with Red Flag being held at Perth's Cannington Showgrounds this coming weekend (4/5th of October). Still seats available and cash to be won! Also, Valhalla is on over the 18/19th October at the St Clair Recreation Centre in Woodville. Get in quick.

Soc sends word of a Canberra Motor Cruise on the 25th of October at 10:30am Sharpish. Heres your chance to show off those riced-up wheels, and get together with some other OCAU groupies.

Blade707 sent in some weird and not so weird links for us! Like the official Spam website, the WhatsBetter site, and the Netiquette guide. Some people need to read the last one.

Finally, issue #178 of ZZZ Online is out for your weekly fix of the weird and wonderful.